Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

New submitter BMOC writes "Anthony Watts of Surfacestations project (crowdsourced research) has finally yielded some discussion worthy results (PDF). He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station, using temperature data from USHCNv2. His initial claims are that station siting is impacting the surface temperature record significantly, and NOAA adjustments are exacerbating that problem, not helping. Whether you agree with his results or not, recognize that this method of research is modern and worth your participation in the review. Poke holes in publicly sourced and presented research all you can, that's what makes this method useful."

He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station, using temperature data from USHCNv2.

Had to read that a couple of times before my internal parser came back with an approximate translation into lay-English.

I fear that this will be ammunition for the climate change deniers, which if I understand correctly is not the intention here. The gentleman in question is merely pointing out possible bias and error and the open invitation is to critically analyse and see if his theory stands up. You know, like real scientific method! Still, I'll sit back now and watch the fireworks in what promises to be yet another pitched battle between the deeply entrenched sides in a war where actual fact is not nearly as important as name calling and idealogical strength of will.

No, he's a well known denier (probably *the* most well known among lay people). He's not a climatologist; he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California. And this is unpublished, and will almost certainly be ripped to shreds when it gets submitted, like most of the other trash he submits. He's funded by the Heartland Institute (a conservative organization that takes industry money and uses it to push various forms of denial of interest to them, including things like global warming denial (funded by Koch Industries), denial of the links between tobacco and cancer (funded by Philip-Morris), etc.)

he's a local meteorologist for a small Fox affiliate in southern California

A weatherman. In some countries, weather presenters are called meteorologists, but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist. Watts' highest completed education is high school, as far as anyone has been able to make out.

AFAIK, the work is relatively simple statistical analysis of time series data. No advanced science required. I have not looked in detail, but they claim that the adjustments made to climate data are biased.

But he didn't attack the man. He merely pointed out that he's not a meteorologist. In my country when I see somebody on TV forecasting the weather that person is a meteorologist, they have spent years studying the weather and know a lot more about the climate than I do. In the US they're just an actor reading from a script.

The US does _have_ meterologists, who might know something about the climate, but this man is not one of them.

Credentials aren't everything. Consider the MCSE, for example. But as a general rule, someone who has documented evidence of study and experience in a field is more credible than someone who doesn't.

Locally, our TV meteorologists are generally worth the title. They carried AMS certifications when it was the exception rather than the rule, and most of them have been here long enough to understand how the local weather patterns behave.

Watt's lack of academic credentials are not the primary reasons to dismiss his work. Those are, in rough order:

1) His results contradict enormous amounts of well-scrutinized other scientific work on both the same and related topics, and explanations offered for that contradiction are grossly inadequate;2) His past results appear to have involved deliberate deception;3) His past results, and a casual reading of these results, suggest a serious ignorance of science;4) His p

He was dismissing the paper because one author appears to not be formally trained as a meteorologist.

Again, this is more about data analysis than weather. You have hundreds (thousands?) of different stations of different quality. Some records are incomplete. Records stop and start at different times. Measurement devices change. Measurement times change.

There is not much in the way of climate science in this, just putting data together. There are implications for climate science, however.

The problem is to put all that data together intelligently. The current paper says the traditional methods are biased to the warming side. If this is not true, it should be refuted.

If you followed the climategate issues, you might realize some established climate scientists appear to have biased their own work to fit an agenda. Some also say they have also worked the peer review system to unduly suppress opposition opinions.

And this will be done rather quickly I expect, by people who are much more competent to judge it than me. It's not quite a simple time series analysis - you also need some domain specific information which I haven't, related to physics and even history (e.g. the introduction of electronic thermometers).

Also: some bloggers do go back to school, and get respected in their field of interest. Just not Watts.

but in general you need to have a graduate degree (heavy on math and physics) involving actual meteorological research to be called a meteorologist

Actually it's a sub discipline or specialization of Geology, along with some other atmospheric sciences like climatology. You don't need to be a physicist or have any advanced math degrees to be competant in meteorology (like you might for atmospheric physics and fluid dynamics).

Why do we celebrate college dropouts who form spectacularly successful Internet startups then?

Science is wonderful: not just the science that supports our world view. Articles on Slashdot frequently parade movements to challenge the science status quo (people making rockets in their garage, open source approaches to publication, etc. Perhaps his findings are garbage, but most of your post was nothing more than an ad hominem attack; your only reference to his research was a link to someone else's challenge,

Would you be kind enough to define how you are using the term "climatologist"?

Do I really need to link wikipedia or a dictionary for you? It's not a vague term; it's a very specific term. A climatologist is a person who studies climate - aka, long-term changes in averages of weather (weather being short-term fluctuations in things like temperature, precipitation, etc). Climate is the signal, weather is the noise. The difference between a climatologist and a meteorologist is the difference between a paleontologist and a biologist.

The paper you link to is dated 2010. I therefore doubt whether it debunks the paper in the story

Correct, it debunks Watt's previous claims. Which is why he had to change them. And will almost certainly get debunked again. He's only ever had one paper published with his name on it, and it amusingly totally undercuts his own claims, arguing that there's no statistical difference in warming trends between good and poor sites and that if anything the global warming trend could be higher than the surface record.

Oh and as regards peer-review, this is an important part of he scientific process, but it is fallible because of the heavy human subjectivity aspect.

Because something is not perfect, it's irrelevant? Is that what you're trying to say? If I write something on a napkin, it's just as good as if experts in a field meticulously review all of the claims of a carefully constructed and controlled study?

In the case of climatology, as documented in the climate-gate emails, peer-reveiw has been effectively subverted by AGW supporters

The issue is not *that* the climate is changing. It's the *rate* of change that's the issue. And sorry, but choosing between an AC posting a random website, and "the scientific process", I'm going to go with "the scientific process".

You're only a sceptic if you can be convinced (by reasonable evidence) that the original claim is true. Otherwise, you're a denier, and discussing the issue with you is a waste of everyone's time.
There are some classic signs that indicate you are a denier, not merely a skeptic. A general pattern is someone from completely outside the field making extraordinary claims that everyone else is doing it wrong. There's usually a conspiracy from the "experts" to shut them out. It's a constantly evolving theory, where the conclusions never change, but the reasoning always does. And, of course, there's usually a lot of funding from an organization with a vested interest in opposing the the original science.
Watt is really no different from the Intellegent Design folks or Jenny Macarthy and the vaccine-autism folks, and he's only a short step from the Time-cube guy.

The research has classified all the surface stations into 5 classes of relevance, from "reliably close to environment" to "poorly sited" in order to evaluate whether and how much the location of the thermometer and its proximity from airports, cities and so on would skew its measures over time. The end result is that there is a warming over time, but that warming is +0.155 C / decade using the best surfacestations, and twice that (+0.309C / decade) if you use them all.

No wait, I read that wrong. It says there is a +.155C warming/decade using the best (classes 1 & 2) stations, +.248C using the worse stations (classes 3, 4 and 5), and that, somehow, NOAA managed to get a +.309C / decade result out of them, by adjsuting upwards the bad stations in order to make up for their poor fidelity, and THEN adjusted upwards the good stations so they would match the poor, adjusted ones.

If it's public, then stop shouting and screaming and pointing fingers like little children and act like a proper scientist and show where it's flawed, if it is.

Which is exactly what the peer-review process does. Which is why you never trust non-peer-reviewed work. I can write whatever I want about anything, make it look like a paper, and then send it out to the media. Which is precisely what happened here.

you would have taken the odd FTL results from the Italian physicists to be true

You're walking down precisely the opposite road. Even one peer-reviewed paper on "remarkable claims" isn't enough - that's just the start of a process that can only be confirmed by a series of followup studies, spawning a process that can lead to dozens or hundreds of papers before one can feel confident in the truth of the matter.

This here is *zero* published results.

Science has checking and verifying results as a major part of itself.

And the scientific process is the peer-review process, which this has not undergone, and will almost certainly fail like Watts' other "work". If he even bothers actually submitting it instead of just saying that he's going to.

To elaborate on the problem, I started reading the "paper" and he's outright misleading right on the first page. He says that siting in peer-reviewed works showed an effect on minimum temperatures but no effect on the mean. The actual papers show a small increase in minimum temperatures, but a much larger *decrease* in maximum temperatures. I'm also noticing in the paper him mixing in peer-reviewed cites with non-peer-reviewed cites without even commenting on the fact that he's doing so, which is a huge no-no.

Basically, his previous work not having shown what he claimed it showed after the peer-reviewed process got ahold of it, he simply changed his formula until it showed a different result. Which will almost certainly get likewise ripped up.

Here's the reality of the situation. The many papers published on the subject of the land record and all of their reviewers are not idiots ignorant of Watts' rogue genius. The issues that he "raises" have been discussed and analyzed for ages. Because of these issues, nobody just takes the raw data and submits it as a result. There are all sorts of calculations to detect biases and compensate for them, and all of these adjustments are analyzed with higher-precision real-world data to see how well they work, as well as cross-correlated with totally different lines of measurement. One study, to pick a random example among many, broke the data down between windy days and calm days, as the urban heat island effect dramatically diminishes on windy days. The calm results were then compared with the windy results to see if they reached the same conclusion.

Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends [nasa.gov]. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?

Needless to say, you don't just have to judge based on your eyes; this has been statistically analyzed and published as well.

Of course, it should be obvious that Watts is wrong just by even a rudimentary look at the surface warming trends [nasa.gov]. Notice where they're strongest, generally? Sparsely populated areas. We're supposed to believe that the extreme warming of Siberian or Canadian tundra is due to a "urban heat island effect" not visible in, for example, New York, Tokyo, London or Los Angeles?

From the press release (didn't you say you read it?):

Other findings include, but are not limited to:

* Poorly sited station trends are adjusted sharply upward, and well sited stations are adjusted upward to match the already-adjusted poor stations.* Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after NOAA adjustment is applied.

Which are, of course, un-reviewed claims, and totally distort the picture (the reason for the adjustments and how they're tested was just discussed in the post right above yours - to sum up, people looking at the GISS dataset aren't idiots and know about the various ways station data can be biased, and have automated algorithms to detect and correct for bias - algorithms which have been rigorously tested by peer-reviewed research, and it should be noted, actually yield a lower warming trend than the raw data, which also shows a greater rural warming trend than urban).

I think the point of the paper is that using new information, Leroy 2010, the way adjustments should be made becomes different. You referencing algorithms that do not reflect the conclusions from Leroy does not in any way disprove that.

Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends. The opposite-signed differences of maximum and minimum temperature trends are similar in magnitude, so that the overall mean temperature trends are nearly identical across site classifications.

Which had already been determined. I'm amazed that Watts was willing to put his name on a paper that basically undercuts his entire premise and says the same thing as papers he's been railing against for ages. Check out the lead author's summary of the paper [wordpress.com], in particular the Q and A section. Although my favorite quote is:

we found that the global average surface temperature may be higher than what has been reported by NCDC and others as a result in the bias in the landscape area where the observing sites are situated.

In the one paper Watts' name is on that's been published (see above), they actually reach the conclusion that there is no statistical difference in means between poor and good stations according to Watts' own dataset.

I understand all this talk about adjusting temperature results for urban sprawl around the measuring stations, but bear in mind that those stations are weather forecast stations, never intended as climatology primary source of inputs. So why don't we simply use a better designed system, such as a thermometer a couple of feet inside the ground: depending on the depth you can average out the daily thermal cycle (a few inches) or even the yearly cycles (a few feet). And there you have your reliable long therm^Hterm trends without any supercomputers or fancy models.

Indeed, that's why there is the (growing) Climate Reference Network [noaa.gov]. The USCRN is a smaller subset of stations which are carefully chosen in terms of siting and instrumentation and carefully monitored in a way that couldn't realistically be done with all stations. The results from the USCRN are then compared with the broader results in both localized and aggregate comparisons and used A) to help refine the adjustment algorithms used to detect and compensate for localization biases, and B) to determine the accuracy of the aggregate results.

Indeed, that's why there is the (growing) Climate Reference Network [noaa.gov]. The USCRN is a smaller subset of stations which are carefully chosen in terms of siting and instrumentation and carefully monitored in a way that couldn't realistically be done with all stations. The results from the USCRN are then compared with the broader results in both localized and aggregate comparisons and used A) to help refine the adjustment algorithms used to detect and compensate for localization biases, and B) to determine the accuracy of the aggregate results.

I'm sorry, but do you want *no* stations in urban areas, even though there *are* urban areas in the US? How do you propose the validity of data from stations in urban areas be evaluated without reference stations in urban areas?

If siting were the problem, then temperature variance would track suburban sprawl and urbanization closely, as it would be a systematic error. It doesn't [noaa.gov]. Instead it tracks mountain regions with greatest snow cap loss, as would be predicted by AGW.

Wrong. The claim is that there is a systematic error, and that will show up in the data set. That the claimed error does not show up in the data set indicates that Watts' hypothesis that poor station citing is the cause is incorrect. According to his hypothesis, we should see a statistically significant increase in warming associated with areas where siting has become worse. We do not. As previous commenters have pointed out, Watts was a co-author on a paper that came to the opposite conclusion.

The issue as other posters have pointed is that the paper points out an adjustment error. How does one adjust well sited stations showing and average warmign trend of 0.155C/decade and poorly sited stations showing an average a 0.248 C/decade trend into a fully adjusted 0.309 C/decade trend? Is badly placed sites show an average of 0.248C of warming so when I average that with the.155C of warring shown by good sites so how would one come up with an ever higher total average of.309C? I mean something has t

Uh... The issue isn't the warming but how much real warming there is as most as in all math I know of one does not get.309 from averaging.155 and.248 but I'm not using special man-made global climate change math like you obviously are. My math and logic would indicate something of an average of.201 C/decade in warming or a max average of.248 C/decade if we ignore all the well positioned sites as one does not get a higher average using two lower averages.

The Surfacestations web site was set up with the explicit aim of disproving global warming by showing that the observed warming in the temperature record is caused by poorly sited measuring stations. And now their results show exactly that. I will reserve judgement until if/when the paper passes review, but I suspect this may be a case of confirmation bias. [wikipedia.org] From the paper:

Comparisons demonstrate that NOAA adjustment processes fail to adjust poorly sited stations downward to match the well sited stations, but actually adjusts the well sited stations upwards to match the poorly sited stations. Well sited rural stations show a warming nearly three times greater after USHCNv2 adjustments are applied.

So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet? It is certainly not impossible, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

So they are claiming that a simple mistake has been made that has the effect of overestimated warming by three times, and that everyone doing this research previously has made this same mistake, and that, despite all of the arguments surrounding climate science and the instrumental temperature record, nobody noticed it yet?

For a long time people have been pointing out that ground based met. stations were showing much more warming than met. balloons and satellites. The urban heat island effect has also been well known.

The problem is that some people have willfully ignored the instrument problems because it suited their agenda.

Watts noticed the specific problem with station siting and he, along with many others, has been documenting it. That part is uncontroversial. Using the methods of Leroy 2010, Watts is attempting to quantify the problem. He isn't a scientist and isn't used to publishing. That may be a problem for him. On the other hand, he had help with this paper and I expect that his co-authors will improve its quality a lot. The paper is up on his web site and many scientists have made helpful comments. By the time it is finally submitted, it may actually be a good paper.;-)

Watts did nothing of the sort. Using photographic tricks Watts willfully distorted the siting of stations, when caught Watts started using Cooperative Weather Observer Program (CWOP) sites as examples of of problems, unfortunately CWOP sites aren't used for climate observations. A paper by Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams Jr. and Michael A. Palecki (JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 115, D11108, doi:10.1029/2009JD013094, 2010) used the data collected by Watts and surfacestations.org to determine the reliability of the station siting. Using Watts data Menne et. al. (2009) showed that by including badly sited stations you REDUCED THE AMOUNT OF WARMING. If you used only stations DEEMED GOOD BY WATTS the linear trend was 0.35 (±0.11), using all stations the linear trend was 0.32 (±0.11) Watts ADMITTED IN A PEER-REVIEWED paper titled "Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends" (Souleymane Fall, Anthony Watts, John Nielsen Gammon, Evan Jones, Dev Niyogi, John R. Christy,5 and Roger A. Pielke Sr., JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 116, D14120, doi:10.1029/2010JD015146, 2011) that Menne et. al. (2009) ANALYSIS WAS CORRECT.

On March 6, 2011 Watts posted on his web site about the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project:

"I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong. I’m taking this bold step because the method has promise. So let’s not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results."

Suddenly when the head of the BEST project says that the Earth's land has warmed by 1.5C over the past 250 years and that "humans are almost entirely the cause" on Sunday, Watts has to shutdown his site proclaiming “WUWT publishing suspended – major announcement coming” and then suddenly he has a "paper" published by the Heartland Institute that says that not only is BEST wrong so is everybody's work!

Watts denounced Muller, the head of BEST project because announced results before the work was peer-reviewed yet he is doing exactly the same thing.

Watts is just a poor pathetic attention seeker who is afraid he will lose the income from clicks on his web site.

I think the purpose of this site is to look at how the original data is collected and check the quality of it. I read through the paper and all they did was re-evaluate the sites to a new standard Leroy (2010). The previous standard looked just at how close heat sources/sinks were from the thermometer. The new standard takes into account not only the distance but area of the heat source/sink. This makes sense to me. It also brings up questions about the roles that shade and vegetation will have as something that needs more study.

This isn't about a large scale heat island effect. It is about a much more local one. If you had a thermometer in a field for 100 years and then built an asphalt parking lot around it you will have an increase in temperature even if it is still in a rural area.

Also it brings up a problem with a sensor that was installed at airports and used for automated data gathering.

I think the importance of this study lies more with how those in the field receive it. A real scientist would be interested if someone pointed out an error in their data collection. A politically motivated individual would brush it off without a second thought saying it isn't relevant. Time will tell.

Certainly it's trying to expose local effects around the sensors that have not been accounted for, yes. Clearly, even the well-sited stations have a positive trend (+0.15 C/Decade), so this paper is not arguing that temperature is going down.

There are many potential problems if you cannot trust your surface temperature record. Consider the problem of putting temperature sensors in space. You can certainly image surface infrared emission from space. However, with an atmosphere like we have that's like trying to image and accurately determine the surface temperature of a human body through blankets. In order to get the temperature accurate, you have to calibrate against something you know. The surface temperature record almost certainly provided a check/balance for the satellites since they began telling us temperature. If you note, John Christy (UAH guy) is on Watt's paper as a co-author. That man knows this study impacts his work, he was smart to get involved. Unfortunately, most of the land surface temperature records have nothing to say about 70% of the earths surface simply because water covers most of the planet. So the limits of these networks should be clear, they're devices that tell us the temperature where we live, they don't tell us about Earth so much.

If the UHI affect is real and significant, that's actually good to know. If humans can control local temperature, it's important to know this and quantify just how much we are controlling the local temperature. It could affect everything from climate to building materials used in the future. It means we can begin to lessen the heat waves that rock our urban centers, that saves lives. It also means we can try to adjust our city planning such that we lower air-conditioning energy use when by minimizing how much heat surrounds the habitable zones in cities. Also, Earth has a recent history of dropping into ice-ages for many thousands of years, so if humans can affect the local temperature with technology, our survival may depend on that ability.

However, I don't see Watt's paper as talking about UHI as much as the localized temperature around the sensors.

The politicization of the subject only favors the dirty politicians, it gives them flags to wave to get re-elected regardless of which side they are on. It's best to keep that aspect out of it.

No. Extraordinary claims require the same evidence as any other claim. There isn't a branch in the scientific method that's taken only when the claim is extraordinary. If you disagree, then think about it this way: would you allow your worst enemy to decide which claims are extraordinary and which ones aren't?

Well, there are multiple problems with the initial statement to begin with.

1) You don't peer review evidence. You peer review written papers. Evidence is what you use to write these papers, it is subject to fact checking, and method analysis, but peer review is not something directed at evidence.

2) As such, scientific papers are not objective evidence of anything. They are an attempted explanation for what we see in nature, they do not constitute evidence of how nature actually behaves.

The article is to be commended for its brevity and clear layout.
However, it seems that the author makes the claim that peer-reviewed scientific papers do not contain evidence, a claim for which no reference is given and which we find to be unsubstantiated. We invite the author to consider that the "methods" and "results" section of a paper detail a set of observations. Short of performing every experiment and collecting observations personally, it is unclear to us what the author considers evidence to be.
Further, the author is clearly unfamiliar with the content of the referenced material. Indeed, with regard to the Sokal affair, the journal in question was neither a) scientific nor b) peer-reviewed. From the author's own reference:

Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies,

and further,

At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist.

In light of the above issues, which we feel are fundamental to the article and could not be addressed in a rewrite, we recommend against publication.

Peer review doesn't 'put the weight of authority behind' the results, and it *does* serve a scientific function. The purpose of peer review is to (attempt to) validate that the methodology used in the experiment/study doesn't have any significant flaws overlooked (or ignored) by the person/team publishing the paper under review.

The only sociological function of peer review is to minimize the amount of flawed science being published. (I say minimize because it is possible for bad/flawed science to slip through peer review. The larger the pool of well-informed reviewers, the less likely this is to happen.)

That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.

That's just stupid. Most qualified scientists agree So we can't trust them to review each other's work . If we applied that sort of thinking everywhere there would be no accepted concensus on basic arithmetic.

It depends on which side of the debate they are on. If they are AGW proponents, then it's a consensus of experts. If they are deniers, then it is confirmation bias.

There is a problem when the definition of 'climatologist' is effectively 'someone who studies the effects of AGW and recommends policy to mitigate it'.

There would be, but that's not the definition of a climatologist. It's also not the selection criteria to be a peer reviewer for a climatology journal. (And, for that matter, climatology journals are not the only places to publish peer-reviewed climatology papers.) It's just what you imagine the selection criteria to be, which is very different.

I really doubt anything useful can be taken from such a model

It's a real shame we don't have a systematic way of investigating the accuracy of a model and are forced to rely on the gut feelings (I mean, doubts) of random people on the Internet.

That's an interesting hypothesis but there's no evidence to support it either. Has "Global warming" become so politically charged that it is impossible for any descenting scientist to publish their rejected papers too? Because while I've often seen this claim of bias in publishing, there doesn't seem to any evidence to support it.

Just think about it, if there really were all kinds of papers rejected for political reasons, I'd think that a group like the Heartland Institute would channel some of their money into publishing their own "heretical" journal. I think the reason the Heartland Insitute hasn't done that, is because there's not enough rejected papers to make the endeavor worthwhile, let alone enough high-quality papers. They seem to use up their entire supply of dissenting opinions at their NIPCC conventions.

I suspect this argument is a manifestation of the False consensus effect [wikipedia.org]. The rationale is: it's inconceivable that no scientists agree with my position, so therefore someone must be silencing them. It allows a person to maintain self-confidence in the face of evidence that says 97% of the scientists involved in research in this area agree with the basic premises of global warming (and 2% are unsure).

Problem is, there's so much politics in the peer-review process already that the argument isn't entirely unbelievable, it's just highly unlikely. Anyone with an ear to the ground hears rumblings about science bankrolled by organizations with an agenda and presented as neutral, or about people who have been denied publication because someone on an editorial board was doing the same work and didn't want to get scooped, or about selection of big names for journals because they were big names rather than beca

The "other side" of this "debate" already has been collecting quite extraordinary results for decades over the entire planet, and had their own real debate about it before writing a report and putting it on President Johnson's desk.The current pro and anti-science debate is really just truth versus advertising. Advertising can look very convincing is enough money is put in to do so but it falls over in contact with reality.

and had their own real debate about it before writing a report and putting it on President Johnson's desk.

I've always said, as soon as the paper is on the desk of President Johnson, the science is settled. All that other work that scientists have been doing for the past several decades, correcting errors, discovering new things......that's all been 'advertising'. Right?

The current pro and anti-science debate is really just truth versus advertising.

The current paper in question is attempting to be part of science. And it might actually contribute to science in a useful way.

It took a while to work it out but are you are pretending the "glass is half full" argument is an example of "shades of truth" and illustrating it with an example designed to stir up people that give a shit about US politics?

Actually I was presenting the He was elected by the least votes and won by the most votes at the same time argument. You do not have to give a shit about US politics, but if you want to retain any resemblance of credibility, you have to give a shit about shades of truth within the examp

extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Of course, that only applies to one side of the debate.

Which claim is extraordinary? The claim that CO2 is a greenhouse gas is not extraordinary. The claim that fossil fuels contain CO2 which is released into the atmosphere when burnt is not extraordinary. The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary. These claims have been known and investigated since the industrial revolution (Fourier in 1824 and Arrhenius in 1896) and are widely accepted.

However, the claim that human emissions of CO2 surpass all the volcanic activity on Earth evidently is extraordinary. The claim that CO2 levels now are geologically high is extraordinarily false (we've had way higher CO2 levels during the Jurassic, for example. And much warmer temperatures, with global averages above 25 degrees. Biodiversity endured.). Actually, there's clear evidence that we're on a cool period; global temperatures are highly correlated with the formation and breaking of supercontinents, and we're between supercontinents).

There should be more geologists in climate sciences. Their long-term view should be considered over the "OMFG we've had 10 warm years we're burning the planet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" alarmism. There are various cycles of global temperatures, ranging from hundreds of millions of years to tens of thousands. A short term (~100yr) variation is nothing.

The claim that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels in sufficient quantities will lead to an increased global mean temperature is not extraordinary

This is the controversial claim in the eyes of anyone who understands thermodynamics: is the doubling of CO2 sufficient to increase atmospheric heat content to a degree that will materially affect climate?

"Mean temperature" is a thermodynamically meaningless quantity, and in a mixed material like the atmosphere, which contains a variable amount of water, increased heat content could actually be associated with a decrease in temperature. The response of the climate system is not a one-dimensional "worse/better" thing, which is the way people who don't understand thermodynamics always report it.

There is general agreement that the CO2 humans have added to the atmosphere in the past 200 years has resulted in 1.6 W/m**2 additional power being trapped at the Earth's surface, comparable to the Sun's brightness increasing by about 0.1% or a decrease in the Earth's mean orbital radius of 0.06% (a quarter of the distance to the Moon, to give a sense of scale.)

Recent work on tree-ring density (published last week in a reputable journal) indicates orbital forcings in the past 2000 years that are up to four times the current anthropogenic forcing, and yet the polar bears somehow survived. This work could be wrong, but the anthropogenic effect is so small an input that many people find the claims that it will result in dramatic, run-away climatic instabilities implausible given it is very likely that there have been comparably-sized changes in climate forcings many times over the past ten thousand years due to centuries-long changes in ocean circulation, orbital dynamics, vegetation type and distribution, etc.

Therefore, the claim that an additional climate forcing on the order of 0.1% will be more than a somewhat costly inconvenience is controversial, and as a computational physicist I am depressingly aware of how fragile and complex climate models are. They are far, far more approximate than the financial models that produced the collapse of 2008.

There are many variations of these reasons to not accept global warming, but in the end it comes down to either denying that the temperature is increasing, denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, denying that increasing amounts of a greenhouse gas will have any effect on the temperature, or denying that burning fossil fuels increases the amount of atmospheric CO2.

(There is another approach - the "we just don't know" crowd. Well, sorry, but that is not how science works, if you want to overturn the existing model then you have to propose a model that better explains the observed data. You can't just wave your hands in the air and say "your model is wrong but I have no idea why" or "your model is wrong because Obama is a socialist and I don't like the United Nations".)

This is good. Now, as the next part of the exercise, can you find the "one dimensional" thinking among many who subscribe to AGW? I would suggest you add in the implications of that logic as well. Let me get the ball rolling:

Belief: Increased CO2 will cause runaway global warming. Reasoning: Venus is 95+% CO2. Implication: continued output of CO2 will take us to a tipping point situation that will result in $badthings (some alarmists go so far as to claim human extinction, more level headed people worry about rising sea levels and changing weather patterns).

Belief: CO2 emissions can be decreased through application of carbon taxes. Reasoning: You get less of what you tax. Implication: imposition of a tax reduces carbon emission, but raises prices of commodity goods, the governments that collect the tax money then spend it on goods that are produced using fossil fuels, meaning no net decrease in CO2 emissions, more poverty, and already impoverished people will have less food.

Belief: Global warming is bad for the poor, therefore not global warming is good for the poor. Reasoning: the opposite of a bad thing is a good thing. Implication: Silliness. The opposite of drowning is dehydration. Neither is good, obviously. In this case, it is bad for people to be forced to move, but it is arguably much worse for them to starve.

Your list is good, because it contains testable predictions. Clearly, mankind puts out a great deal more CO2 than volcanoes, so that is not a valid argument against AGW. However, other things come out of volcanoes, and as far as greenhouse gases go, CO2 is the ultimate lightweight. You can only get weaker effects from diatomic and mono-atomic gases. I would be interested to see what else comes out of volcanoes in quantity.

Sorry but the total heat released by chemical combustion (and nuclear power) is so miniscule compared to the energy coming from the Sun that it can be ignored in any first order calculations. A 2008 study by Mark Flanner [agu.org] finds the total waste heat produced by human activities amounts to 0.028 W/m^2 while the total forcing from additional greenhouse gases we've emitted is 2.9 W/m^2, over 100 times as much. Waste heat is just not an issue.

Yep and here's NOAA's extrodinary evidence debunking Watts' extraordinary claims [noaa.gov]. It's a blindingly simple statistical experiment that you can do yourself. Here's the youtube video about it [youtube.com] that Watt's tried to take down with dubious DCMA notices. It's not a total loss though, it's true he has collected the best database on the condition of US weather stations (which NOAA used to debunk his claims in the pdf). Such a database sounds like it might be useful for improving the stations but the pdf above list several reasons as to why it might not be so useful.

An intellectually honest person (ie: an amateur scientist), would take those sort of criticisms seriously and either rebut them or withdraw the claim. Watts' behavior is little better than a youtube troll, I suspect he gets a buzz out of the attention.

Yes, well given that the report just showed basically the same trend as IPCC reports, the report was not really the story. The real story was that we had a big non-believer on AGW had a change of heart when he did the research himself and came to the same conclusion as IPCC.

It basically said that if you dont trust IPCC reports - do the research yourself and you will get the same results.

This is misleading almost to an extreme. Muller was well known for being skeptical of the research. He in particular attacked the "Hockey Stick" (See his article from 2004: Global Warming Bombshell [lbl.gov]. His criticisms were such that he was universally regarded as a skeptic prior to BEST (see Quotes by Richard Muller [skepticalscience.com], and his skepticism regarding the research was consistent. Note that Watts initially supported BEST, and that work was finance

1 - He has published it, on the web, otherwise you would not be able to read it.
2 - Publishing something in a peer reviewed journal does not make something inherently better, or worse.

Peer review is not some kind of mystical spell that you cast on results to make them "scientific". Peer review simply means that peers, people working in the same fields as you, have gone over the results and agreed with them. Typically, two, to the author anonymous reviewers, go over the paper, after an e

In fact Science and Nature do peer-review their articles. The first step is a decision by the editor about whether or not it fits with the journal/has the scope of a Science/Nature article. That's usually the hard part to get by (I've heard 10% of articles get by this stage). Then it goes out for review, where at least two, sometimes three referees review it. This is true for short form ("reports") and long form ("research articles") papers.

He uses a siting classification system developed by Michel Leroy for Meteofrance in 1999 that was improved in 2010 to quantify the effect of heat sinks and sources within the thermometer viewshed by calculation of the area- weighted and distance-weighted impact of biasing elements to calculate both raw and gridded 30 year trends for each surveyed station

What the hell did I just read?

I swear there are parts from the Corporate Bullshit Generator going on in there...

Published or Unpublished is not a reliable indicator of quality or reliability. Google Andrew Wakefield for a great example of published rubbish.

Am I understanding you correctly here? "Because the foundation of the world's scientific knowledge has failed at times before, its worthless and we should trust random things written by people with no credentials that no experts in the field have reviewed as much as everything else"?

I just wrote on a napkin, "The world is flat". Clearly that's as good as peer-reviewed science because of Andrew Wakefield.

I'm sorry but this is America where they don't want you thinking for yourself because you wont consume, consume, consume and spend, spend, spend. Slaves are so much better and cheaper then real workers.

Is the reverse true? Do you blindly accept the statements from the guys in lab coats even knowing that they've been wrong time and time again?

(No, I'm not advocating religion or disbelief in science. I do advocate learning and thinking for yourself though.)

Hrm. The structure of your sentence suggests these "guys in lab coats" are wrong more often than not and this it is an accepted fact. But as modern science is founded on "guys in lab coats" doing research, and as a beneficiary of their work, I can plainly see that this is not the case. My phone works, my medical presciption works, etc.
And of course, nobody blindly accepts anything in science. Peer review, and other "guys in lab coats" recreating the original experiments and publishing their results.
You post as a whole seems an supportable attempt to instill doubt in science, despite your otherwise reasonable final sentence.

Publishing is quite political, and journals are often reluctant to publish controversial findings.

Journals like controversial findings, for the same reason that newspapers up-play their headlines: it attracts attention. Furthermore, a shoddy paper with a controversial conclusion will often spur a slew of debate and comments, each citing the original paper, and thus raising the journals impact factor.

Further, larger / more prestigious journals are extraordinarily reluctant to publish a paper if the author hasn't already published enough in the past, again, regardless of the papers actual quality.

This would be relevant if the paper had been disregarded for not being in a prestigious journal. It wasn't, it was disregarded for not being in any journal. There is always a journal that will publish the paper, it is just a matter of trying until you find it and/or are lucky with the reviewers.

Be honest and let the findings stand or fall on their own merit, not your opinion of the author or how he decided to make his findings available.

The way the research is published often raises some question: If it is good enough to pass peer review, why hasn't it been tried? There is a reason why "science by press conference" is a derogative.

This paper, in addition to three of the papers posted online in October 2011, have been revised based on input received through the peer review process. A fifth paper has been provisionally accepted for publication,

Provisional acceptance is a post peer review [agu.org] stage associated with getting the paper properly typeset,choosing which graphics to print in color, signing copyright transfer fees and other minutia that don't bear on the scientific value of the w